Thursday, September 27, 2012

GOODBYE AMERICA! HELLO ROMANIA!

Next week at this time, I'll be in my apartment in Romania/Moldova! Its so weird to think that my time is coming to an end at the MTC. It's been great, but I am ready to get out of here! Something really exciting that happened on Friday last week was that I got my TRAVEL PLANS! It's says I'm traveling by myself, but that's because I'm the only Russian speaker going to my mission right now. Here's my flight schedule: Oct 1 SLC-->Detroit, Detroit-->Amsterdam, Oct 2 Amsterdam-->Romania. A lot of long flights ahead of me, but I look forward to all that time I get to catch up on my sleep ;) But in all seriousness, we (my district) all challenged each other to talk to at least one person at each of the airports and all of our flights, since, ya know, we're missionaries! To be honest, I can't wait to see what happens.

So our teacher Bro. Okoren decided to leave us and go to Lake Powell last week, SO. In his place, we had a Ukrainian teacher and his name was Bro. K... Let me just say right now, most intimidating guy I've ever met... Anyway, we played a game with the Russian numbers (which are the hardest things to say in Russian) and he made us sit down if we said it wrong. My companion had a panic attack every time it was his turn to say a number haha funniest thing ever! Another really cool thing I found last week was a Mormon message called "The Will of God". This seriously changed my view on any trial I've ever had, ever. It's about D. Todd Christofferson's talk "As many as I love, I Rebuke and Chasten" from the April 2011 conference, I think. I'll let you all watch it on your own, because it is so powerful. Oh yeah, so I'm pretty sure many of you saw the Bigham City Temple dedication (don't worry, I got to see it too!) and it sure is a beautiful temple! I'm glad I got to see it before I went.

Hmmm, okay... Funny story. So like I said, our teacher Bro. Okoren hasn't been here, so we had another teacher named Bro. Duffy, and he had us all practice contacting him, and our district has only practiced contacting TWICE... So Ct. Grover and I just happened to be first... We went outside, tried to find him, and when we found him, we were like, "Okay, we going to walk up to him and say that we noticed his tie, then ask him if he is a business man." Guess what... NO tie! So we basically followed him like stalkers until we figured out a good way to start a conversation. We ended up telling him that we noticed his shoes... and luckily it worked. Thank goodness for the Spirit!

Well. This will be my last email from the MTC. It's been an amazing 12 weeks, and I look forward to the 21 months ahead of me. I cannot thank you enough for your love and support! I hope to have many fun and exciting stories to tell you for the rest of my mission, and I can't wait to hear your voices on Monday! Love you!

-Elder Farnworth

P.S. There's some big news coming that will "change the church". Steven Chapman told me that Elder Nelson said that maybe they will tell us during general conference, which is in a week and a half!! I'm excited to hear it! Thanks for the culturegrams too Dad, they really helped me to understand whats it's going to be like over there. Can't wait to tell you all about my first week in Romania!